Matthias SpeicherIn short
Above the energy layers sit more of them. Generating your own allows dynamic pricing, as long as it stays legible to the customer: the base price as the ceiling, movement only downwards. Then dwell time, loyalty, advertising and direct selling, fleet contracts. And the layer that gets underrated most consistently, the data, the new gold. Taken together the charging park stops being a petrol station and becomes a platform, where several parties pay for different uses of the same asset. Sell nothing but kilowatt-hours and the consolidation will take you.
The first part dealt with the electricity itself and the infrastructure that moves it. Trading on the exchange, balancing capacity for the grid, clipping the load peak. Revenue layers that all exist before a single coffee crosses a counter. Others sit on top of them, and they walk the charging park step by step away from simply selling energy.
Generating and staying
Put PV on the roof or over the canopy and a generation layer appears. Then the site isn’t only reselling bought electricity, it’s making some of it, which pushes down the cost base. Together with arbitrage, generating your own opens up dynamic pricing, though it has to stay legible to the customer. The base price should always be the ceiling, with movement only downwards. The well-known Coca-Cola episode, the vending machine meant to charge more in the heat, explains why. A surcharge on the chilled price on a hot day gets rejected. A discount off a base price set higher, handed out on a cool day, doesn’t. Same price difference, packaged the other way round, and the customer responds completely differently.
The amenities, coffee, food, a clean toilet, somewhere to sit, remain a possible layer, but the one with the most conditions attached. It only carries where the dwell time allows it. Depending on the site it needs planning permission, or a concession in the first place, and it isn’t viable everywhere. And it forces a question that has to be answered up front: with staff or without. The vending machine is one answer, but there’s a service organisation behind the vending machine too. Somebody refills it, maintains it, cleans it, carries the liability. Outsource it or run it yourself, every one of these layers is an operating decision in its own right, not something you pick up along the way.
Loyalty, advertising, fleets
Subscriptions I’ve dealt with separately, so only the core here. They need rebuilding, away from punishing the occasional customer and towards rewarding the regular one.
Coupling with retail goes further than renting out space. Bundles are possible. Charge here, get a discount in the shop. Or the other way round, shop here and get part of your charging cost credited back at the till. Two offers pushing customers towards each other rather than standing side by side. Then advertising, because a site full of waiting people and screens is a medium. And it doesn’t have to stop at advertising. The same screen could sell directly, a coffee at ten percent off, ordered on the spot and collected from the café next door.
And fleet contracts, where the money behaves differently from passing trade. Fleets aren’t only buying kilowatt-hours, they’re buying reliability, guaranteed slots, availability they can plan around. Heavy transport learns this logic first, because a lorry waiting for a free charge point is losing money from the moment it stops.
The new gold
All of these layers are already described or being built somewhere. One gets underrated more than any of the others, and it’s the new gold: data.
A charging park generates data other people want. Where and when load appears, how it behaves, how it responds to price signals, how quickly a section of the network fills up. A network operator needs that to plan where the next bottleneck forms and when to reinforce. A supplier needs consumption and flexibility patterns to steer a portfolio. The charging park sees all of it first hand, in real time, at a resolution the network operator often lacks at that particular point. Aggregated and anonymised, it becomes something sellable. At which point the operator is no longer selling electrons, but knowledge about electrons.
What follows from this
Read this way, the multi-layer revenue model is a platform economy. The site and the grid connection are the platform, and several parties pay for different uses of the same asset. The driver for energy, the network operator for flexibility, the retailer for the margin, the advertiser for attention, the fleet for certainty, the data buyer for insight. The kilowatt-hour is only the way in, exactly as fuel is at the petrol station. The business itself comes from the layers resting on the same infrastructure.
And that business matters more the thinner the margin on the kilowatt-hour gets. The harder the competition on charging price, the less there is to earn from it, and the more weight shifts to the layers nobody copies easily. A grid connection in the right place, storage, a fleet relationship, a stream of data about behaviour at this specific node. None of that gets rebuilt on the next street over.
The provider selling nothing but kilowatt-hours is standing in the same price fight as a thousand others, and in the consolidation already under way it will almost certainly disappear. The one drawing several returns from the same infrastructure, and holding the knowledge about the last of them, stays.
Sources
Charging infrastructure as a platform and data as a second income stream beyond the kilowatt-hour: Codibly, codibly.com; AMPECO, ampeco.com.
Dynamic pricing and price fairness (base price as ceiling, discount rather than surcharge): the underlying mechanism is loss aversion. The Coca-Cola vending machine episode of 1999 is widely documented, but it was an announced idea that drew a backlash, not a published field trial. A solid source should be attached to the specific wording before publication.